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How Thom Yorke, Mark Pritchard & Jonathan Zawada Created a Surrealist Audio-Visual Realm Reflecting Modern Anxieties
For their disconcerting new album Tall Tales, Radiohead's Thom Yorke and producer Mark Pritchard developed a similarly unnerving companion film.
Neither Pritchard nor Zawada offers direct interpretations of Yorke’s lyrics – though some, like haunting standout “The White Cliffs,” where he sings “I get kind of nervous/ I want it all to end/ I don’t understand the purpose,” are relatively straightforward – but like much of Radiohead’s music, dread pervades Tall Tales. Visually, Zawada used black-and-white mid-century footage from Manchester – kids digging holes, smashing windows, lighting bonfires – and spliced it together with colorful claymation clips from decades ago. Since they met, Zawada has admired the musical eclecticism of Pritchard, who has recorded in different styles under a series of monikers over his career, and he mirrored that philosophy on Tall Tales, which flits from abstract psychedelia to vibrant cartoons to snippets of real-life footage culled from the internet.
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